8th September 2011 Archive

Rocks from Isua in south-west Greenland have been hailed as providing evidence for what geologists believe is the source of complex and heavy elements on Earth: an asteroid shower that endowed our young planet with gold (as well as platinum, iridium, nickel and tungsten).

While the solar industry continues its campaign against the new NSW state government, which in its first budget cut back further on subsidies to solar installations, another landmark event has passed with much less notice: various experts and analysts now put PV power cost at parity with the cost of buying electricity from the grid.

At last. Hitachi Data Systems is buying hardware-accelerated filer supplier BlueArc for an undisclosed cash sum, leaving NetApp as the last significant man standing from the filer side of the industry and giving HDS a powerful file storage capability.

The lack of any direct storage expansion in Apple's iOS products has been one of the more enduring causes of complaint for those using or pondering on owning one of these devices. Kingston Technology demonstrated its idea of a workaround when it previewed the MobiSX at CES at the beginning of the year. Now in production, with a name change to boot, the Kingston Wi-Drive relies on wireless data transfer to deliver its 16GB or 32GB iOS storage expansion.

A survey into attitudes ten years after the 9/11 attacks has found that three out of ten Americans are happy to let the government read their emails without a warrant. And this rose to 47 per cent for emails addressed to foreigners.

A medical student who copied the private data of 87 patients onto a memory stick – and then lost it – has landed the University Hospital of South Manchester in trouble with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

Fraudsters will not be able to extract confidential information from a person's contactless bank card or other compatible technology as the type of data held on such cards will be restricted, Will Judge, head of future ticketing at Transport for London (TfL) has said.

There are plenty of PDF viewer apps available for iOS devices, so it’s a little surprising that it’s taken this long for Adobe - deviser of the Portable Document Format - to release this CreatePDF app.

Take this as you will, but it's claimed that many upcoming Ultrabook laptops will use a fibreglass chassis to bring production costs down to the point where their vendors can sell the machines for under $1000 (£627).

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so we're well and truly flattered that JP Morgan has taken a leaf out of the El Reg Bootnotes book and decided that figurines are the best way to illustrate important news.

As the government works on drawing up yet another definition for open standards, the man in charge of the Cabinet Office's team of IT coders is keen to talk about a future where all government tech is based on, well, open standards.

Top boffins reviewing data from a NASA satellite dedicated to probing the secrets of the Sun say that some solar flares directed towards Earth deliver much more energy than had previously been thought.

We didn't really expect Larry Page to take two full days out of the Googleplex to sit down and talk about patent infringements with the software company Oracle – he's got maths to do, nerds to manage and Google+ updates to write. But Google could have come up with someone a bit senior to meet the mediation team from the enraged software company.

Security watchers warn that hackers might be able to develop potent attacks that would be extremely hard to foil by combining DNS hacks of the kind that affected The Register and other high-profile websites over the weekend with DigiNotar-style forged digital certificates.

Cybercrooks are gearing up for the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with a range of malware traps and hacking attempts both on social networks and the wider internet, net security firm BitDefender warns.

Still smarting from a counterfeit secure sockets layer certificate that threatened at least 300,000 of its users in Iran, Google has no plans to fortify its Chrome browser with an experimental technology that bypasses the current system for validating websites.

The word out of Taiwan is that the iPhone 5 is now being churned out of Foxconn Electronics sweatshops factories at a rate of 150,000 per day, and that five to six million of the li'l fellows will be shipped by the end of September.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority has given telecommunications providers a five deadline to improve customer services as a result of the 12 month investigation into the industry’s consumer code of practice.